官员垂直交流与环境治理——来自中国109个城市市委书记(市长)的经验证据

Capital Officials Communication and Environment Governance——Empirical Evidence from Chinese Party Secretaries and Mayors in 109 Cities

以往研究通常将中国严峻的环境危机归结于地方政府及其官员环境治理失败,本文以中央政府对地方官员的"隐性治理"——官员垂直交流切入,探讨中央政府在环境治理中的作用与责任。通过2003—2011年109个环保重点城市市委书记(市长)和城市的匹配数据,分析了官员垂直交流对环境质量的影响。研究结果表明:官员垂直交流不利于城市环境质量改善,垂直交流强度会加强这种负面效应;良好的制度环境能够抑制垂直交流官员对环境质量的负面影响;垂直交流官员的环境治理行为受到流入城市初始环境质量的约束,但不受干部环保考核机制影响。进一步的考察还发现,垂直交流官员的环境治理行为逻辑可以从两方面解释:第一,中央政府垂直交流官员去治理环境污染的意图不强;第二,垂直交流官员拥有政治晋升优势,环保政绩激励效果不彰。因此,加强污染治理的长效机制是完善制度环境和中央政府对环境治理进行选择性再集权。

The objective of this paper is to clarify the role of the central government in environmental governance and accountability. Based on the relationship between central and local government in the most effective perspective-capital officials' communication,we match party secretaries and mayors' experience with 109cities' economic and social data from 2003 to 2011,and examine capital officials' impact on the regional environment quality. The results show that:(1)capital officials deteriorate regional environment quality;(2)capital officials with higher center index are more inclined to harm the improvement of regional environment quality,but good institution can weaken the negative effect;(3)cadre environmental protection assessment doesn't affect capital officials' environmental governance behavior,but they choose different policies which meet their needs according to regional initial environment quality:if they are transferred to the districts with worse environment,they won't deteriorate local environment,but if they are transferred to the districts with better environment,they won't improve local environment either. We also find that capital officials' environment governance behavior can be interpreted from two aspects:first,the central government is no intention to solve environmental pollution by means of dispatching capital officials;second,officials' different sources mean different political promotion incentives,and capital officials have higher opportunity for promotion. The key limitation of the study is that it uses PM10 as the environment indicator,which makes it difficult to reveal the whole environment quality. We make some conclusions that a long-term mechanism to improve environment is to establish improved institution and the central government should centralize environmental governance to some degree.Firstly,compared to the researches which blame the local government and its officials for environmental governance failure,this paper illustrates the role of the central government in environmental governance and ac-countability. Secondly,it enriches the existing literatures on empirical study of cadre communication. Existing literatures usually focus on the relationship between cadre communication and regional economy,and this paper puts more emphasis on capital officials' environment governance.